THE PAST PERFECT

IN ENGLISH

You will recall that the tense normally called ‘the present perfect’ is:

I have seen,  you have looked, she has written,  etcetera

For the PAST PERFECT it is –

I had seen, you had looked,  she had written and so on.

Like all verbs in English, the past perfect is easy to formulate:

It is the simple past tense of ‘to have’

plus the past participle of the verb you wish to use.

Using the verb ‘to eat’ as an example (past participle: eaten) –

So, in English the two words of the verb, ‘had eaten’ never change.

When do we use the past perfect tense?

We use it to describe an event in the past which comes before another event in the past. Like many descriptions and titles in grammar, 'past perfect' does not convey any meaning to me, so I prefer to call it

'the past before the past'.

I use this title because the past perfect operates to express a time before a simple past tense event. A sentence using the past perfect tense will nearly always contain a simple past tense also.

Like the past progressive (or continuous) tense, the past perfect is a story-telling, or reporting, tense and doesn't normally mean much by itself.

Examples of its use - past perfect in red, simple past in bold:

I had been working there for five years before I was promoted.

When I arrived at the party they had been there for an hour.

I had been in Hong Kong for four months before I met her.

They had visited Cracow four times before they moved there.

They had reached Algiers and it was still early afternoon.

Accordingly, the past perfect tense relates events in sequence and, in isolation, it doesn't tell the whole story.

For example, if we use the simple past or the present perfect we can express a complete fact or idea –

The first two tenses give you a complete meaning but the past perfect leaves us thinking, 'and so?'  ‘What is next?’

In speech we probably think of 'have been' and 'had been' as meaning much the same thing, but this is an error. – there is no need to use the past perfect if the present perfect is adequate.

A sentence using the past perfect isn't usually complete without another element, another fact, a simple past tense.

Of course it is always possible to express these meanings in another way -

‘I had been a soldier for five years before I became an actor.’ [past perfect]

could easily be expressed, ‘I was a soldier for five years and then I became an actor."’

‘She had been skinny all her life until she married him.’  [past perfect]

could be expressed, ‘She was skinny all her life until she married him.’

These are acceptable alternatives, as English usually gives you more than one way of saying the same thing.

But perhaps the past perfect is a little more precise and appropriate in conveying the idea of perspective of time or depth of time.

It is certainly not obligatory to use it if you can compose a correct sentence in another way.

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You can now hear the correct pronunciation of these names,

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